This invention relates to computer systems for the delivery of financial services. Financial services include banking; general insurance; life assurance, pensions and investments; loans and mortgages; and financial planning and advisory services.
One of the channels for delivery of financial services is the Internet. For example, a customer wishing to purchase vehicle insurance, or a broker acting on behalf of a client, could access the websites of a number of insurance companies to obtain the cheapest quotation or get a quotation which is most suitable to a consumer's needs. Similarly, a consumer requiring advice about investments or pensions could access the websites of life assurance companies, banks or brokers.
This results in a number of problems for a consumer. The workings of the Internet are complex and a consumer may find it difficult to find the most appropriate sources of financial services. Financial products can be complicated so that a consumer may have difficulty in comparing the relative merits of each quotation. Similarly, financial advice can be complicated, and a consumer may have difficulty in understanding its relevance and so may be unable to apply the appropriate recommendations.
The object of the present invention is to provide a way of alleviating the problems discussed above.
The present invention makes use of an existing technology referred to herein as "mobile agents" (or simply "agents"). A mobile agent is software, which is able to transport itself between a number of different locations within a computer network (e.g. the Internet) and can, within limits, execute at any of those locations. Tools for providing an environment in which such agents can operate are commercially available from a number of different vendors including IBM (product is Aglet Work Bench), Fujitsu (Kafka), General Magic (Odyssey), ObjectSpace (Voyager), and Mitsubishi (Concordia). However, the present invention is not restricted to the use of any particular one of these tools. The embodiment of the invention to be described below uses Java as the agent programming language.